I'm about 40ish-15 with an allies deck in the 2-mans, it's not that much more competitive than TP. Of course, I've also gone 3-1 in a couple dailies with it, so it's not that bad. I'm surprised more people aren't running it, it's only 1bout $40 and wins against top decks. I've only lost against jund twice, and only once against vampires which was more to screw than to the deck. The only problem is it has a terrible matchup with boss Naya.
Nice article. Did you mention where the matches were played, whether they were tournament matches or not? I think it's significant. If you're aiming to build a T1 deck then wins against the casual room really don't count and even the tourney practice room is dubious. You should go to 2-man queues, 5-1 would truly be impressive there.
Both singers trigger, so they both become 3/1s. When he went peaks/singer with a singer in play, I was at 9 life staring at a 5/1 and a 3/1 when I had passed the turn with only a little 1/1 as the threat.
It was always like that with red, yes, but I think the haste density has gone up for red with WWK. In Zen, you had Mark of Mutiny and Ruinblaster at uncommon, and Tuktuk/Bushwhacker at common. Worldwake has battlesinger, Skitter of Lizards, and Crusher Zendikon at common, and Cunning Sparkmage at uncommon.
What puts WWK over the top is that even red's other color, unless white, gets common haste creatures with the zendikons in the mix. Taking into account the small set factor, I think we'll see more common/uncommon haste stuff in the worldwake round than we will in the Zendikar rounds.
The point is that it's fun to speculate and it's nice to see what cards are left and how they work. I never would have realized that Equinox works differently than something like Cursecatcher if not for this article.
I completely love this series for some reason. And I too have long loved Equinox ever since I opened one in my first Legends booster.
You have a sense of humor in your writing that makes me smile. Like, "This card is also the origin of the ""Goblins think they're smart but end up destroying your artifacts instead!"" motif that's been going on for like 16 years."
As Shard noted, prices move very wildly during the release weeks. I get my prices on Thursday and the article goes live Friday... and even still, there are a lot of things that move up or down in the 24 hour delay between postings. :/
my thoughts on the eye. if i crack it im passing, but if its comes to me im taking it. why? well in my experience thus far i have been passed one on 4th and one on 5th pick and i cant say no to that. what did i pass up? who knows, i either won 2 or 3 packs those drafts so i didnt kind the impact of missing a 4th or 5th pick and when eye explodes, and i bet it does, i will have more in the collection to sell off.
Dread Statuary and Quicksand are tough cards in this format. I like them both a lot in the abstract, but in practice, it can be hard to fit them in without really hurting your colored mana base. In a deck with already suboptimal Spire Barrages, I didn't think the sanctuary was an option.
Yeah, I have faith in the programming team that anything can be programmed to a high degree of accuracy... it's more, "is it really worth their time to create this new type of interface/effect, and test it online with every possible type of interaction?" I think in a lot of these cases, it's just not worth it.
Some of these will be trivial, but they all involve at least a little new code to handle. This is the set of cards where they probably can't just steal code directly from older cards and change a few numbers, because they all do something fairly unique. (Raging River should probably be part of this list, too, though I'm sure it's trivial to program. I'll pick it up later.)
As for Word of Command, I'm sure they could get a reasonable approximation that worked correctly 99% of the time without too much trouble. But there actually are a lot of subtleties to the card that I think would make the final 1% tough.
your 40 plague rats, 20 black lotus deck would have been suicide in those days. Considering we could have 40 card decks. That aside the 13x mox sapphire, 13x ancestral recall, 14x black vise deck one of the true old timers at the shop i played at had would smoke it. Not to mention the 11x Mox Ruby, 7x Wheel of Fortune, 7x Sol Ring, 15x bolt deck I ran. But since we played for fun in those days, we never really ran those decks unless some noob tried the 15x swamp, 25x plague rat.dec
One reader tweeted about how in the R1G1 #5 spot, I had the "blink Smoldering Spires" play to make the battlesinger unable to block at all, taking away Villain's option in the matter and making the "Villain declines to block" statement odd. That *is* exactly the play I made in the actual game, I just wrote that part up quickly and didn't advance the replay past the R1G1 #5 screen because I knew I won that turn.
At some point I'm going to have a Ruin Ghost and a Tideforce Elemental in play along with spell lands and landfall creatures and my head is going to explode...
None of the programming issues you've mentioned are big deals. Mana for Word of Command is just an application of the knapsack problem (Wikipedia it), and tracking sources of effects (Vodalian War Machine) is literally a non-issue. Same for Chaos Lord/Moon- keeping track of the number of permanents is facile.
In other words, don't worry too much about the programming. There's no reason any card shouldn't be able to be programmed into MTGO.
Eye of Ugin definitely ranks among the top most useless draft picks that are worth money, but being mythic rare, it doesn't come around too often.
Tormod's Crypt in Timespiral draft and Lotus Petal in Tempest draft are couple of other near unplayable money cards that I've seen wheeled over and over before.
Nobody plays City in a Bottle in Vintage, against Bazaar Pithing Needle is almost always better. If Library gets unrestricted then that might change, but probably not. The decks that fear Library the most are control decks that probably run their own.
Well, when he cast the second Battlesinger it wouldn't have been a trade; one of them is 4/1, surely, but the other's just 2/1 unless I'm missing something.
I think you're spot-on about Red, though I don't know if that's really changed -- that was always the way it felt to me in the triple-Zen drafts where I had red, too. It's why Mark of Mutiny really seems like a good card, and why the new land is so solid: my games w/red always seem come down to situations where my opponent is clearly on the edge of stabilizing, or has stabilized, and they feel like they 'should' win but I hit a Tuktuk grunts or Mark of Mutiny + Shortcutter or something and deal the last six to finish the game. Nothing frustrates quite like losing to that sort of short-sighted, all-in Red strategy (not to be confused with the deck of the same name, of course).
Good point. Clearly I was spacing on that interaction, as I described thinking in terms of trading with the battlesinger when I could be blocking with a 3/3. I'll have to chalk that up to new-card syndrome--I'm definitely prone to these kinds of oversights in my first experiences with a flexible card. Heck, I even called out Ruin Ghost as a Worldwake game-changer two articles previous due in part to its ability to create instant-speed landfall, but then in practice I just didn't factor it in.
I'm not sure it changes my decisions to have that play in mind, though, since the battlesinger never seemed like much of a threat when I was making my attacking decisions. The multiple Teetering Peaks and a second battlesinger kept turning it into a threat, but each time it did, blocking would have been a trade anyway. Hmmmmm.
Certainly one takeaway is that between the zendikons, creatures with "haste" actually in the rules text, and Teetering Peaks, red really has the ability to take innocuous-looking board states and make them suddenly dangerous. "Stay back to block?" is going to be an interesting question against red in the next few months.
I'm about 40ish-15 with an allies deck in the 2-mans, it's not that much more competitive than TP. Of course, I've also gone 3-1 in a couple dailies with it, so it's not that bad. I'm surprised more people aren't running it, it's only 1bout $40 and wins against top decks. I've only lost against jund twice, and only once against vampires which was more to screw than to the deck. The only problem is it has a terrible matchup with boss Naya.
Nice article. Did you mention where the matches were played, whether they were tournament matches or not? I think it's significant. If you're aiming to build a T1 deck then wins against the casual room really don't count and even the tourney practice room is dubious. You should go to 2-man queues, 5-1 would truly be impressive there.
He's going to rule in Momir games that go long. Although your odds of finding Darksteel at 11 are still better than finding Kozilek at 10.
Both singers trigger, so they both become 3/1s. When he went peaks/singer with a singer in play, I was at 9 life staring at a 5/1 and a 3/1 when I had passed the turn with only a little 1/1 as the threat.
It was always like that with red, yes, but I think the haste density has gone up for red with WWK. In Zen, you had Mark of Mutiny and Ruinblaster at uncommon, and Tuktuk/Bushwhacker at common. Worldwake has battlesinger, Skitter of Lizards, and Crusher Zendikon at common, and Cunning Sparkmage at uncommon.
What puts WWK over the top is that even red's other color, unless white, gets common haste creatures with the zendikons in the mix. Taking into account the small set factor, I think we'll see more common/uncommon haste stuff in the worldwake round than we will in the Zendikar rounds.
How did you have those Plains and Mountains available for gameplay?
The point is that it's fun to speculate and it's nice to see what cards are left and how they work. I never would have realized that Equinox works differently than something like Cursecatcher if not for this article.
I completely love this series for some reason. And I too have long loved Equinox ever since I opened one in my first Legends booster.
You have a sense of humor in your writing that makes me smile. Like, "This card is also the origin of the ""Goblins think they're smart but end up destroying your artifacts instead!"" motif that's been going on for like 16 years."
Equinox is the only card on this list that scares me, and I'm the one that rewrote the layers, dependencies, and copy effects code.
Other than that, the only cards that "scare me" are ante, dexterity, and Shahrazad.
you are still a useless troll but ballsy enough to put a name...however if you didnt like it why read it?
What is the use of this article... the game is MTGO not why not MTGO.
Useless.
the article was posted friday many price swings can hapen over the weekend
Was there a mistake on jace's price? You've put it going from 44 to 36 when it's now now priced at 44 and was priced at 36 last week.
yup thats a lot of clicking with that combo
my thoughts on the eye. if i crack it im passing, but if its comes to me im taking it. why? well in my experience thus far i have been passed one on 4th and one on 5th pick and i cant say no to that. what did i pass up? who knows, i either won 2 or 3 packs those drafts so i didnt kind the impact of missing a 4th or 5th pick and when eye explodes, and i bet it does, i will have more in the collection to sell off.
Dread Statuary and Quicksand are tough cards in this format. I like them both a lot in the abstract, but in practice, it can be hard to fit them in without really hurting your colored mana base. In a deck with already suboptimal Spire Barrages, I didn't think the sanctuary was an option.
Yeah, I have faith in the programming team that anything can be programmed to a high degree of accuracy... it's more, "is it really worth their time to create this new type of interface/effect, and test it online with every possible type of interaction?" I think in a lot of these cases, it's just not worth it.
Some of these will be trivial, but they all involve at least a little new code to handle. This is the set of cards where they probably can't just steal code directly from older cards and change a few numbers, because they all do something fairly unique. (Raging River should probably be part of this list, too, though I'm sure it's trivial to program. I'll pick it up later.)
As for Word of Command, I'm sure they could get a reasonable approximation that worked correctly 99% of the time without too much trouble. But there actually are a lot of subtleties to the card that I think would make the final 1% tough.
your 40 plague rats, 20 black lotus deck would have been suicide in those days. Considering we could have 40 card decks. That aside the 13x mox sapphire, 13x ancestral recall, 14x black vise deck one of the true old timers at the shop i played at had would smoke it. Not to mention the 11x Mox Ruby, 7x Wheel of Fortune, 7x Sol Ring, 15x bolt deck I ran. But since we played for fun in those days, we never really ran those decks unless some noob tried the 15x swamp, 25x plague rat.dec
One reader tweeted about how in the R1G1 #5 spot, I had the "blink Smoldering Spires" play to make the battlesinger unable to block at all, taking away Villain's option in the matter and making the "Villain declines to block" statement odd. That *is* exactly the play I made in the actual game, I just wrote that part up quickly and didn't advance the replay past the R1G1 #5 screen because I knew I won that turn.
At some point I'm going to have a Ruin Ghost and a Tideforce Elemental in play along with spell lands and landfall creatures and my head is going to explode...
Thoughts on the Dread Statuary in pack 3 pick 1?
None of the programming issues you've mentioned are big deals. Mana for Word of Command is just an application of the knapsack problem (Wikipedia it), and tracking sources of effects (Vodalian War Machine) is literally a non-issue. Same for Chaos Lord/Moon- keeping track of the number of permanents is facile.
In other words, don't worry too much about the programming. There's no reason any card shouldn't be able to be programmed into MTGO.
Eye of Ugin definitely ranks among the top most useless draft picks that are worth money, but being mythic rare, it doesn't come around too often.
Tormod's Crypt in Timespiral draft and Lotus Petal in Tempest draft are couple of other near unplayable money cards that I've seen wheeled over and over before.
Nobody plays City in a Bottle in Vintage, against Bazaar Pithing Needle is almost always better. If Library gets unrestricted then that might change, but probably not. The decks that fear Library the most are control decks that probably run their own.
Your articles rock. Keep up the good work.
Well, when he cast the second Battlesinger it wouldn't have been a trade; one of them is 4/1, surely, but the other's just 2/1 unless I'm missing something.
I think you're spot-on about Red, though I don't know if that's really changed -- that was always the way it felt to me in the triple-Zen drafts where I had red, too. It's why Mark of Mutiny really seems like a good card, and why the new land is so solid: my games w/red always seem come down to situations where my opponent is clearly on the edge of stabilizing, or has stabilized, and they feel like they 'should' win but I hit a Tuktuk grunts or Mark of Mutiny + Shortcutter or something and deal the last six to finish the game. Nothing frustrates quite like losing to that sort of short-sighted, all-in Red strategy (not to be confused with the deck of the same name, of course).
Good point. Clearly I was spacing on that interaction, as I described thinking in terms of trading with the battlesinger when I could be blocking with a 3/3. I'll have to chalk that up to new-card syndrome--I'm definitely prone to these kinds of oversights in my first experiences with a flexible card. Heck, I even called out Ruin Ghost as a Worldwake game-changer two articles previous due in part to its ability to create instant-speed landfall, but then in practice I just didn't factor it in.
I'm not sure it changes my decisions to have that play in mind, though, since the battlesinger never seemed like much of a threat when I was making my attacking decisions. The multiple Teetering Peaks and a second battlesinger kept turning it into a threat, but each time it did, blocking would have been a trade anyway. Hmmmmm.
Certainly one takeaway is that between the zendikons, creatures with "haste" actually in the rules text, and Teetering Peaks, red really has the ability to take innocuous-looking board states and make them suddenly dangerous. "Stay back to block?" is going to be an interesting question against red in the next few months.